


Magic's Chosen

by DeclannDreams



Category: LACKEY Mercedes - Works
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-23
Updated: 2019-12-23
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:27:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21922891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeclannDreams/pseuds/DeclannDreams
Kudos: 1





	Magic's Chosen

*Older, the silver-grey of age and wisdom had spread its creeping tendrils through his hair and salted the dark pepper of his beard - he had a beard - as the only sign of the passing of years. Vanyel stood defiant before an army of soldiers marching in formation, the ground thundering under each step they made forward, armored in a volcanic black stark against the snow undisturbed between the trees that lay between the herald-mage and the encroaching enemies. 

The last flickering edges of the glamour he tore from them shimmered away from reality, revealing twice the number of soldiers originally seen. The lines around Vanyel's eyes sharpened as the corners of his mouth drew down and his eyes hardened. He reached the edges of his mind out to the forest, drawing on the vast well-spring that had made him the most well-known of the herald-mages of Valdemar. He was also the last - coming north to determine why the rest had fled here and never returned. Here the answer lay before him, an attack aimed at his beloved Valdemar and seeking to find them unprepared. Something he would never allow.

He reached out to the forest, drawing upon the massive reserves of untapped magical ability that made him the most-feared herald-mage to ever live, that had him named magic's chosen, and he cast his spell*

Vanyel woke with a cry muffled into his pillow, jerking sideways and landing with a dull thump on his arse, cold stone against his rear shocking him only partially from the terror of the dream. For long moments, Vanyel shivered on the floor from the cool wind along the cold sweat down his back and neck where his blanket had fallen down along his waist. His mind followed the tracks along his dreams, scenes of death and anguish, ending with his final spell in the woods along the north of Valdemar. All he could see of his future as a herald-mage from this dream was misery and doom drawing ever nearer with every lesson. 

He sprang from the floor, blanket pooling around his ankles, and pulled on his trousers, boots, shirt, and robes over it all. He stuffed his clothes, the traveling food he had, his coin, and the top blanket from his bed haphazardly into the nearest pack with a haste born of fear of the future. He opened the door of his room, padded softly into the hallway, and closed the door with a muted click which echoed through the deserted hallways, then padded his way softly through the halls and out of the acolytes' tower, through the nigh-dead streets of k'Treva Vayle and out the open northern gates. 

Four hours he walked through the snow up above his ankles, snow pouring in the top of his boots with every step and wetting the bottoms of his robes, while his mind tracked back and forth from the horror he'd witnessed in his dream - a lifetime of the suffering of others - to the lessons he'd had in the acolytes' tower - camaraderie with his fellow acolytes, friendship with his professors, the ability to actually do something. Frozen and distracted as his mind was in the dark, hidden and near completely covered as the road was in the dark, he could scarcely find his way in the deep and dark hours after midnight that had just claimed the world. He stopped in the middle of the swirling flakes of white stark against the dark grey of the early morning sky before dawn. He almost turned back twice, then turned back to the long road forward home. The third time he turned toward k'Treva Vayle, he took three steps before all of the senses he'd honed during his months in the acolyte's tower went off at once, a magical cry for mercy that caused his eyes to widen, the feeling from his lessons of doing something and helping - helping - to echo through his head, and his feet to turn straight toward the direction of their own accord with blind speed. His pack lay forgotten and half-buried in the snow kicked up by his flying feet.  


He followed the source of the magical cry, tracking it as best he could though he knew it was hopeless. If the direction he was headed had a mage who could send a summons for help - that still needed help - then what could a mere acolyte do? He was untested, untried, used to theory and only the barest practical applications of the spells he had been walked through over and over by his instructors, conveniently forgetting the lessons of the basics of magic - that everyone had some trace of magical ability and desperation could result in a cry for help from even the most untrained young child. His feet still flew in the direction of the cry. 

When Vanyel reached the edge of the forest glade and the source of the cry, he froze. Stalking through the ruins of a once-prosperous village in the beautiful center of the grove, across the trampled snow littered with splashes of blood and black ash, a silver, scaled beast prowled ever closer to a mother crouched before two small children, all shivering and unmoving in the falling snow. The amethyst eyes of the colddrake never broke contact with the three humans while her massive forked tongue flicked out of her massive maw to sample the air and almost close enough to taste the woman, the two children peering at her under the wide-spread arms of their mother. The colddrake prowled forward with another slow, languorous step forward,content in her cruel certainty that these peasants had nowhere to run or hide that she could not easily catch them if they could even manage the willpower to break her calling and flee at all. Her step forward revealed the body of a man, roughly the same age as the woman, with the vicious and tearing marks of her claws through his abdomen and chest cavity, mouth still open in a soundless scream. 

Vanyel spend several wasted seconds wondering first why they did not run, idd not flee, until the lessons of his magical creatures came to back to him in the form of a rhyme, "Silver and amethyst, the colddrake hunts for prey, its glowing eyes can hypnotize and steal your soul away." Then he spent many minutes more agonizing over what he could do, if anything, because he was only a first-year acolyte mage..

Off to the side of the colddrake, from a barn - one of the few buildings not torn down by the massive monster's thrashing tail - an old man watched the large lizard's other foot move forward in another slow step. He tracked his eyes from the drake's to those of his family, then back. His face clouded when he knew it held them in thrall and he charged forward with the pitchfork clutched in his hands. He rammed it deep through the scaled side, causing the colddrake to turn toward him, breaking the eye-contact with the woman and two boys as it thrashed its tail toward him with deadly force that sent him flying through the air to land in a broken heap against the shuddering side of the barn. . Even so, the distraction broke the calling as the old man knew it would.

"NO!" The cry left Vanyel's lips in a broken shout as he charged forward, fear and despair left behind in the snow with his pack. He drew the power from his tigers' eye crystal, throwing a magical shield around the the woman, the children that the colddrake's tail and claws scraped off of uselessly, throwing it back into the trees as he slid to a stop between the massive, pale lizard and the peasants. His blue eyes frozen over like the snow between him and the lizard, he flung her high into the air, spinning end over end, then crashed her straight down into the stone-cold earth with a sickening crack and a splatter of red to join the rest of the warm rouge already melting the snow, tears spilling helplessly from his eyes, down his cheeks, to make small, melted pockmarks in the snow. 

He moved enough earth to make graves for the villagers with his magic, laid them out in the graves, and then recovered them with earth with a delicate touch. He helped the woman, the two young boys, and the few villagers who had managed to hide to pack what they could from the destruction, carrying some of the packs himself along with the younger of the two boys on his shoulders. Tears still fell at intervals from his eyes along the four mile march from the village back up the road to k'Treva Vayle along his nearly covered track in the dark, but Vanyel guarded them all the way and help each individual or group of villagers settle into their rooms in the guest quarters of the mages' hall. 

Vanyel earned the first two lines of his song, "Magic's Chosen: Vanyel the Herald-Mage" that day: "SIlver and Cardinal lay on the snow that day/for young Vanyel unfroze his spell and chose the mages' way."

Vanyel had his own version of the day's events: "The of the common folk can move a man to tears/or give him courage to take a stand and conquer all his fears."


End file.
